Live 9 Pricing

[ezelkow1]

Yeah the new browser forces you to work it's way: you have to have a well organized library, and your live presets should compy with the browser file structure.

If you do it it works great, if you don't it's a pile of shit.

it takes choices away from you, so it's a steaming pile, period.
Worst new "feature" in 9.... think about it in terms of external hard drives, that you just want to browse audio clips on, not add them all to your library to do so.... bleh! Definitely a "what the hell were they thinking?" situation, but so far I see no uproar from the beta testers so Live 9 will ship with this "feature".

Yea it seems all the 'browse to random location' topics stopped being bumped after a while when everyone gave up months ago since it seemed like they weren't listening. Their only solution was to index everything, and then wait hours on end when you just wanted to grab one file, or use the work around of finder/explorer in which you lose all preview options.

I still occasionally try to bump mine on the files only showing up while live is open, but have gotten no response on that one either. It was listed as a 'known problem' months ago in one of those early browser threads, but after months it still isnt fixed. So basically anyone that wishes to just drop random samples with ease, or modify their sample libraries without live running is screwed

[sporkles]

Define "uproar"... I'm pretty sure the only ones who haven't received the new browser negatively are those who've only casually tried it with the included content.

It's quite bizarre that Ableton spent all this time on Live 9 without getting such a basic feature right from the get-go. The problem now is that they're too deeply invested in their browser. I don't think its reception from beta testers has had any impact at all.

This being said, I don't see the huge problem with the "Places" section of the browser. If anyone has such a disorganised HD, let that be a lesson. I'm a lot more concerned by the fact that search results don't include sub-folders. Fucking ridiculous.

[Machinesworking]

@sporkles,
personally I have two computers, typical desktop and laptop situation.
No, I don't want to have every sample from the desktop on the laptop, and yes I use external HDs with this setup to transfer files. Plus often I just toss a tweaked audio file from the laptop onto the desktop of the tower, which isn't a searchable hard drive... Essentially if you think it's great that a feature has been stripped from the browser then great, I disagree, but saying it's just a matter of having a tidy desktop is ignorant on your part. You have no way of knowing how others work.
Personally I think this is a half assed attempt on Ableton's part to fix the lost files problems people have, and the simple fact that their search functions for this problem are abysmal compared to the competition. Kontakt for instance can use OSX's spotlight to quickly find missing files and I'm sure it has a similar ability on the windows side.

[ezelkow1]

Personally I think this is a half assed attempt on Ableton's part to fix the lost files problems people have, and the simple fact that their search functions for this problem are abysmal compared to the competition. Kontakt for instance can use OSX's spotlight to quickly find missing files and I'm sure it has a similar ability on the windows side.

Problem is it doesnt even work particularly well at that either, the missing samples issues. I recently got the driven machine drums live pack since I already had the rest of the pack. So i fired up live, drop the new packs into my userlib in the drums preset area, and anytime I opened any preset it still didnt know where the samples where even though they were in a dir named the same as the preset in that folder and live had already indexed all of the samples in there. So it failed miserably at trying to find lost samples if that was its goal. Had to go through, scan each of them individually and re-save each preset. Couldnt do them all at once either since some of the racks shared samples, so if you scanned the whole drum dir you would get duplicates of some and have to pick them out anyway

[sporkles]

@sporkles,
personally I have two computers, typical desktop and laptop situation.
No, I don't want to have every sample from the desktop on the laptop, and yes I use external HDs with this setup to transfer files. Plus often I just toss a tweaked audio file from the laptop onto the desktop of the tower, which isn't a searchable hard drive... Essentially if you think it's great that a feature has been stripped from the browser then great, I disagree, but saying it's just a matter of having a tidy desktop is ignorant on your part. You have no way of knowing how others work.
Personally I think this is a half assed attempt on Ableton's part to fix the lost files problems people have, and the simple fact that their search functions for this problem are abysmal compared to the competition. Kontakt for instance can use OSX's spotlight to quickly find missing files and I'm sure it has a similar ability on the windows side.

I'm not being judgemental or assumptive. I just honestly can't see why keeping samples spread out across a hard drive is desirable. The new browser and the way it categorises sounds by their file and folder names (which is far from a good substitute for a proper tagging system) made me realise just how much of a mess my library was, and I've reorganised it from scratch, so that it matches - at least as far as possible - Ableton's own classification system. This was a very nice "side effect" for me. But even pre-Live 9, it would never occur to me to drop a file I intended to use in Live on the desktop. I've always had a "temp" folder inside my samples folder for this sort of stuff, and the samples folder resides alongside my "tracks," "ideas" and whatnots folders inside a folder called, simply, "Music." Now all I had to do was drop the Music folder in Live 9's "Places." If you've got additional samples on an external drive, just drop the relevant folder into Places. This is seriously the least of my concerns with the new browser.

I do, however, agree that the browser is half-arsed. There's simply no way I can be convinced of the rationale behind dropping a tag based system for one based on file and folder name when (content in) sub-folders is not included in the browser.

[Machinesworking]

I have a ton of reasons why a system that demands I index a folder or hard rive before being able to use it is undesirable for me. First off I don't just work in Live, and not everything I may want to do to an audio file in Live involves staying in Live. I see no benefit to having multiple destinations in Live's browser of folders filled with files I rarely if ever use in Live just so I can use Live's browser. Basically when I do upgrade to 9 I'll be mainly using drag and drop from the finder for more than I do now. Not an improvement, like I said, it probably does help with finding missing files, but it's IMO lazy on Ableton's part when Kontakt and other DaWs do it with better OS finder integration, and allow full finder searching in their bowsers.

[kitekrazy]

Well I'm still in shock that Ableton believe Live 9 is the best DAW on the market that after 5th March new users will be charge: £559 for suite. The competition... Pro Tools 10 £459, Cakewalk Sonar X2 £385, Cuebase 7 Advance £435 (prices from DV24/7 as of 26/02/2013). I really like Live but I know as a company you have to have a sensible market strategy and a product that is competitively priced.

As a company you have to ask why would Customer 'C' buy product 'L' over product 'P'? Product 'L' being Live and 'P' protools! Live has many great features but so does every other DAW and in the end for many it will be price. At the moment I feel Ableton have mispriced themselves out of many new customers pockets.

I agree that their pricing is not attractive to new users. I think FL Studio XXL is almost half the price of Suite. One difference is everything in the Suite is proprietary and can't be used in other DAWs. (like Reason) Outside of M4L, Ableton doesn't seem to team up with other vendors to attract new users. Presonus teamed up with Celemony, Sony with Izotope, and being a Sonar user for many years I've gotten some great 3rd party software to use in other apps.
As others' mentioned before there's not a great discount to attract existing and new users. At some point "famous producer A uses Live" will eventually lost it's luster.

[darkenedsoul]

OK, to talk about the browser....I have a folder called Loops which has a bunch of directories with samples/loops in it (one shots, loops, etc...no Live Library or VSTi library content at all), how will this affect me from this new browser perspective? I just want to be able to do like I used to within Live to select one of the three additional icons to get to my hard drive(s) that house the samples (same on my laptop). Is this that much of a cluster fakk? If so I am severely disappointed even more than this pricing gaff for Suite 8 owners (my opinion, especially for a fricking WEEK ONLY, WTF are they thinking?

It is seeming more and more that I won't waste my hard earned coin on this update during the special *week* discount and possibly in the future since it'll be $50 more or higher after this period in time. I seriously think they are being severely money-hungry and it is putting a fair amount of people off IMHO of course.

If I decide to spend any coin on this debacle it will be for Standard only since I got all the other instruments sans M4L and its additional effects/additional content. Do we even KNOW what more orchestral stuff they are adding over and above EIC 2? That is kind of shady IMHO as well. But comparing what I have to Live 9, doesn't look like I'm going to be missing much (and half+ of the content I could give a rats ass about, I don't care about hip hop/dance/junk I don't even use/want/need...when I did bother with it I ran it through SIR and mangled it so you had no idea WTF it was to begin with...but that's a waste of my time, I want something I can USE for my style. They still gear their stuff to club/DJ stuff IMHO when there are a whole lot more genres out there that could benefit from Live's stuff in general. Anyways, enough of my rant, I just hate bloatware that I won't even use....

Mike

[ezelkow1]

you can just add that folder to the list of places and live will index it, so you can still drag n drop and select it just like before. Until they fix it though just make sure to add any new content to that dir while live is open or else it wont be indexed and you wont be able to see it

[heavensdaw]

There's a lot to SHARE here.. ooh hold on... did I us a dirty word??.. Oh yeah now I think of it, I bought a software license that was promoted with a particular feature that never was.. Thanks for your offer Abes.. but I'm NOT impressed..
Max 4 Live hmmm ... another user/customer shafted here ... Not looking so good is it?

Hd

[Gnuus]

Unfortunately I cannot afford an update from Live 8 Suite to Live 9 Suite, because of the economic situation in my country where the senior citizens are extremely exploited!

[crumhorn]

Going to skip this upgrade offer for now, I need my cash for more important things. There will be plenty more opportunities to get a discount on the upgrade - if history is anything to go by.

[Ben_Binary]

Define "uproar"... I'm pretty sure the only ones who haven't received the new browser negatively are those who've only casually tried it with the included content.

It's quite bizarre that Ableton spent all this time on Live 9 without getting such a basic feature right from the get-go. The problem now is that they're too deeply invested in their browser. I don't think its reception from beta testers has had any impact at all.

This being said, I don't see the huge problem with the "Places" section of the browser. If anyone has such a disorganised HD, let that be a lesson. I'm a lot more concerned by the fact that search results don't include sub-folders. Fucking ridiculous.

Thats not good.

[sporkles]

Actually, Amaury did say they were considering including sub-folders in the content pane when browsing categories, etc., and I'm still really hoping they'll fix this. I suppose I worded my complaint wrongly; as I was talking about "browsing results," not search results. My bad. What grinds my gear, though, is that the search is restricted to whichever folder/category you've selected, and you have to click "all results" if you simply want a hit list. Furthermore, to actually locate your search hit, you have to a) highlight the relevant category/folder, and b) manually expand every single folder until you're at the one actually containing whatever you searched for (this is less of a problem in a search than when using categories, but still silly behaviour).

[tintala]

Funny how Propellar Heads last MAJOR upgrade was............drum roll..

PAY WHAT YOU WANT! I paid 25$ just coz I was feeling generous. not to mention Reason is ALREADY 64 bit. they were very generous.

as an existing SUITE owner I would even pay 600$ for PUSH and a 9 upgrade... but 800$?? wholly robbery batman!

Still using Maschine, I want Push and 9 but I aint ready to be bung hole raped for it.